I see that as an startlingly programmer-centric view of the world. I've worked with some great CEOs and not one of them could code or had any interest in coding. In no instance I have ever experienced have I looked at a CEO, good or bad and thought, the best thing you could do for this company would be to spend six months learning to code.

A good CEO shouldn't have to have every skill used by their organisation and I don't see how coding is any different to accounting, legal, sales or any other skills in this respect.

The mark of a good CEO is to be able to build good teams, be trusting enough to let them do the work they need to and smart enough to see when the wool is being pulled over their eyes.

If you need to be able to code to trust your developers, you've either got the wrong developers or a trust problem, neither of which are likely to be solved by programming.

You're missing the point here, I think, which is that if a founder (not the same thing as a CEO necessarily...) puts a few months into learning the basics of coding and attempting to build a rough prototype, they may end up:

1) with a greater appreciation of the talent/experience required for good development, a better BS detector arond technical issues, and a stronger understanding of what they don't know OR

2) a false impression that proof-of-concept = product and an over-inflated idea of what they've learned.

I definitely agree that founder #2 here is someone to be avoided. Not because either one of them would be expected to contribute to the actual development, but because founder #2 is showing flaws of perception, ego, etc. that are serious red flags, and will affect their execution of non-development tasks.